5 Responses to hAccessibility: BBC drop hCalendar microformat

“I’m not sure I have enough faith in the Microformats community to come to an agreement on this topic. In my short time following the various Microformats mailing lists, I quickly became disillusioned with the community and administrators. I witnessed several instances of heavy handed administration, including the banning of users. Frequently, no real reason was given and I was left w/ the impression that it wasn’t much of a community after all.”

the question is, should those of the rest of us who have been bothering to use them so far (sometimes adding small but still significant time to the development time, which might be better spent on other matters) carry on, or drop them ?

That’s a conundrum. There are two things to consider – your audience (how likely is it that you have, or may have at some point, people using assistive technology to view your site?), and how quickly will the microformats cabal agree to a workable and accessible fix?

Unfortunately, on the latter point, the evidence is that the cabal don’t even properly acknowledge the problem (see discussion under Patrick’s post, as referenced in mine, above).

the third factor to consider might also be how many people (or machines) might be actively – & exclusively – using the microformat data compared with how many people there are using – or likely to use – assistive technology to access the site ?

certainly with a service / information site like http://www.birmingham-alive.com i would have thought accessibility should overrule implementations of contentious emerging technology; presumably the machines can read the iCal links just as effectively as the hCal markup ?